For many students, going to college is their first time living away from their parents and that means they might need a little help from their friends: Resident Assistants.
“[RA’s] are the preeminent leaders on our campus,” said Kevin Hughes, vice president of student affairs at Christopher Newport University. “We’ve built so much of our student outreach through them.”
The RAs are students themselves — Hughes said they are specifically chosen because they display traits of a more mature student.
For William & Mary, those students also are an integral part of the campus network in ensuring the support and well-being of residents.
“The RAs are not solely responsible for addressing concerns with students, they are a part of the broader network of faculty and staff that are on campus for each and every student,” said Holly Alexander, associate director of residence life for community development for the college. “RAs serve as a resource, referral and communication agent.”
As one of the first lines of interpersonal communication between staff and students, Hughes said RAs have to be selected very meticulously.
At CNU, RAs go through an extensive interview process to make sure they can handle the responsibility of caring for their peers. First, a student must go through an application process, then an individual interview, then a group interview, and then a four-week course after which they can be selected to start training.
When going through the process, Hughes said the staff look for students who interact well with others and can identify challenging situations and then can come up with quick, reasonable solutions.
This past year, CNU had 90 RAs who were either selected through the process in 2018 or were returning after having already worked as an RA.
Once the group of students are selected, they then have to go through a rigorous training process to make sure they can support the students, especially the freshmen, in their residence halls.
“Our training is broken down into separate parts,” Hughes said. “When we do safety training, we talk about how to respond to a particular issue, about what we would need our students to do because [RAs] are going to be the ones shepherding students in emergency scenarios.”
But RAs are more than just students who know where the fire exit is. This group of individuals handles students going through transition, Hughes said, which means other students might reach out to them with tough topics like mental illness or Title IX.
“We don’t ask [RAs] to be counselors,” Hughes said. “We ask them to identify someone who seems to be struggling and know where to find the experts. RAs are trained to help out in the immediate but then know where to get the student to the proper resources.”
At William & Mary, students are trained with an emphasis in understanding their own roles and developing connections with residents to build welcoming communities, Alexander said.
“We feel really good about our RAs, we rely on them a lot,” Hughes said. “They provide great insights to administration and connecting with students because, at the end of the day, they’re students themselves.”
